One man's journey to understand The Bachelor.

Week 3 – I Just Don’t Think We’re There Yet.

Imagine with me for a minute, about a 13-year-old boy at a carnival. I’d ask you to close your eyes because imagining is better that way but it would be impossible to read at the same time. So unless you’re a person who likes to have this blog read to you, keep your eyes open. Back to the 13-year-old boy. Remember, he’s at a carnival. More than anything, this boy wants to be a grown up. The boy finds a creepy looking wizard in a box, we’ll call him Zoltar, and wishes to be big. The next morning, the boy wakes up and he’s still him, only he’s in the body of a 36-year-old failed racecar driver who sells real estate in Scottsdale because online college was too hard.

This is our bachelor. Arie Josh Baskin Luyendyk Jr.

He talks like a child. He moves like a child. He even kisses like a child who learned how by watching All My Children with his mom while home sick from school for a week in 7th grade.

He touches the ladies faces like an instructor works the wheel at a make your own pottery place. And man, does he touch a lot of faces. In fact, he touches all the faces but one. Only on this incredible show can you be the 18th wheel on a date. For a man who walks into every room with his lips puckered and his hands in caressing position to tell you, “I just don’t think we’re there yet”…He got there with Tia from two bales of hay! If you can’t compete with two bales of hay, it might not be a great sign.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before all of that we went to wine country where the merlot had cherry overtones and an oaky, awkward finish. Put your nose into the glass and it smells like a train wreck.

What’s the opposite of wine? Super mean lady wrestlers who can still ¾ roll with the best of them, even after all these years. We learned pretty quickly that there’s no laughing in wrestling because what could be funny about wrestling?

Women cry. Women fly off the ropes. And two of the women accidently get super sexual which leads a grandma in the audience giving us a face that says, “This isn’t Hamilton! What did I buy tickets to???”

Later during drinks, Krystal annoys everybody and the nation enters into a debate. What is worse, the words coming out of Krystal’s mouth, or the sound they make while they’re being formed? The answer is yes. Finally something we can agree on!

What goes well with wrestling? Dogs. Dogs is the answer. Not even Buck Laughlin can save us from what’s happening on stage.

At one point a cute little girl wanders up to add some charm to the thing but she’s ushered off because this is the least enjoyable day with dogs since Annaliese’s childhood trauma. The dramatic reenactments should win all the awards.

Back at the mansion, desperation strikes hard. Bibianna sets up a romantic area that proceeds to be defiled by pretty much everybody else. One after another, Arie brings his prey to Bibanna’s special place while she sits in another room and tries to make sense of it all.

Meanwhile, poor Annaliese is begging the “kissing bandit” to steal some Frenches but the Kissing Bandit won’t lick.

And that’s how we end things. Two of the ladies who really needed to go home were let off the hook while the rest of us clutched our throw pillows and finished off our chardonnay.

Let’s go a tiny bit deeper below with some quick hitters on the women I think were still on the show this week. And remember the key. Ladies in blue have just been kicked off because they are sad.

Ouch. Annaliese leaves the mansion giving us two of the most memorable weeks in the show’s history. Hats off for at least trying, but hats gently off. I think Annaliese could be traumatized by aggressive hat-taking-off.

She got almost no time this week but she also didn’t cry about how scary dogs are. At this point, it’s enough.

She goes bold, telling Arie that she doesn’t need him. Then she doubles down and tells him he goes for single moms because he wants to be needed. It’s the sass that can only come from a really short haircut.

Ask any former lady wrestler and they’ll tell you, Bibiana’s mom can’t spell. Poor girl was made for the first two weeks of a reality dating show but not for anything more. She leaves us, broken. Watch for her to talk way too much at the Women Tell All.

No date for Brittany this week but she didn’t set up a makeout couch and then get shot down while the man she is dating made out with everybody but her on it. And that’s enough to keep going.

She cried when one of the Laurens left and then couldn’t stand to hear Krystal talk down to the women. Another in the list of women I think might be too good for Arie.

She’s a mom and a dog owner that is bad with kids and dogs. It’s what every boy dreams of finding in a wife.

She looks like she’s in the middle of filming an Herbal Essence commercial. Also, her eyes say, “…sigh, It’s Jacqueline not Jackie”.

You hear about people taking redeye flights and then waking up in donut shops in totally random cities and you think, that could never happen. And then you watch Jenna and you’re like, I need to talk to my teenagers about the dangers of Ambian.

I think there’s a 50/50 shot that Arie thinks Kendall is really good with keeping animals calm because he doesn’t understand what taxidermy is.

I want to put Krystal in a car, drive her out to the woods to come sort of place where there’s a lodge and a high ropes course, sit her down, give her a cup of tea, and tell her to stop it. Just, stop it.

Lauren seems completely normal until you get her in a wrestling ring and put fake money up her skirt but I guess you could say that about any of us. (Full disclosure, it could’ve been Jenna in the ring. It was hard to tell watching through a blanket.)

You know things aren’t going well for you when a Bachelor actually eats the food. But Lauren gives us both the meltdown and the realization that she’s melting down. It’s actually refreshing to see a woman with enough self-awareness to know that she’s going down in flames. I could see Lauren S coming back for Bachelors in Paradise or just living nicely in the real world, far away from wine country.

Another blonde who looks a little too much like Arie’s mom.

Mirikh got into the ring to give us wrestling and instead gave us a cross between super-soft-core porn, watching a mime delicately folding a fitted sheet, feeding really thin pasta into a pasta maker, holding a newborn baby duckling, and interpretive dance at Christian camp.

She didn’t get a date this week but she also went to Yale. Seinne is smart enough to hang back and let the crazy be taken out.

She melts down at the wrestling match but Arie likes to see it because he can save her and, “gets to be the man”. Sometimes I feel like this show might not be setting a perfect example for the young women watching at home. But then I think no, Chris Harrison is in jeans and a button down, this thing is casual and fine we’re all fine.

Let’s think about that for a week and come back to see what happens when the crew hits the road!